An excess of a particular serotonin receptor in the center of the brain may explain why antidepressants fail to relieve depression symptoms for 50 percent of patients, indicates a new study published in Neuron.
The authors say the study is the first to find a causal link between receptor number and antidepressant treatment and may lead to more personalized treatment for depression, including treatments for patients who do not respond to antidepressants and ways to identify these patients before they undergo costly, and ultimately, futile therapies.
The disastrous magnitude 7.0 earthquake that triggered destruction and mounting death tolls in Haiti this week occurred in a highly complex tangle of tectonic faults near the intersection of the Caribbean and North American crustal plates, according to a geologist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI).
Jian Lin, a WHOI senior scientist in geology and geophysics, said that there were three factors that made the quake particularly devastating: First, it was centered just 10 miles southwest of the capital city, Port au Prince; second, the quake was shallow—only about 10-15 kilometers below the land's surface; third, and more importantly, many homes and buildings in the economically poor country were not built to withstand such a force and collapsed or crumbled.
While people typically blame incompetency when airport security screeners fail to keep dangerous weapons off airplanes or when doctors miss developing cancer tumors, the real culprit may be evolution, according to researchers at Harvard Medical School. Their new study published in Current Biology suggests that people simply haven't evolved superior skills for finding things that are rare.
"We know that if you don't find it often, you often don't find it," said Jeremy Wolfe of Harvard Medical School. "Rare stuff gets missed." That means that if you look for 20 guns in a stack of 40 bags, you'll find more of them than if you look for the same 20 guns in a stack of 2,000 bags.
It's interesting that in reading this
review the first thing one is struck by is that Sowell is guilty of the very thing he's railing against. Setting himself up as a individual intellectual with "ideas" to tell others how things should work.
I'm sure readers of this post may argue that I'm doing the same thing and they would be correct. Therein is Sowell's fatal flaw, because anyone with an idea can be labeled an "intellectual" and be subject to the criticism that he levels. It is noteworthy that apparently, in his view, the only "intellectuals" worth criticizing are liberals, but that's just his bias showing I suspect.
A few days ago, I read Oldest Biblical Inscription Deciphered, Archaeologists Say by our News Staff, and found it fascinating. It takes one back to Solomon, who, according to the Bible, had a thousand wives (that’s includin’ concubines, I have to tell ya.) Now people like to embellish these stories, and my mother sometimes would sing this:
Oh Solomon, he had a thousand wives
And bein' a kind hearted fella,
He wanted all o' them
To lead contented lives
So he bought each mamma
A grand piana, ....
The CDF Collaboration has recently produced a new analysis of proton-antiproton collisions at the now second-world-best collision energy of 1.96 TeV. They searched for very rare decays of the B mesons, particles composed of, would you guess, a b-quark and a lighter partner orbiting around each other.
An expert panel of library scientists, publishers, and university academics said today that the results of scientific research funded by the federal government should be made freely available to the public "as soon as possible after those results have been published in a peer-reviewed journal."
The Scholarly Publishing Roundtable was convened last summer by the U.S. House Committee on Science and Technology, in collaboration with the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP). Policymakers asked the group to examine the current state of scholarly publishing and seek consensus recommendations for expanding public access to scholarly journal articles.
Loss of smell function may predict the onset of Alzheimer's disease, according to a new study published in the January 13 issue of the Journal of Neuroscience. The research links a loss of smell function in Alzheimer's disease (AD) model animals with amyloid ß (protein) accumulation in the brain, a distinguishing hallmark of Alzheimer's disease.
While much concern has been generated by the obesity epidemic in the United States in recent years, with about one-third of adults obese in 2007-2008, new data suggest that the rate of increase for obesity may be slowing, say the authors of a study appearing in the January 20 issue of JAMA.
"Data from 1988-1994 showed that the prevalence of obesity in adults had increased by approximately 8 percentage points in the United States since 1976-1980, after being relatively stable over the period 1960-1980. Analyses of data from 1999-2000 showed further increases in obesity for both men and women and in all age groups," the authors write.
If left unaddressed, the U.S. government's growing debt will inevitably limit America's future wealth and risk a disruptive fiscal crisis, claims a new report from the National Research Council and the National Academy of Public Administration. The report lays out several tax and spending options that would stabilize the national debt within a decade as well as a set of simple tests to determine whether any proposed federal budget would lead to long-term fiscal stability.
